The greatest of song cycles - Schubert's Winterreise - has been given a radical new look by baritone Simon Keenlyside and choreographer Trisha Brown. They explain to Ismene Brown in The Daily Telegraph.

Two young men died, a year apart. One was 32, and died suddenly; the other was 31, and his death was expected. They did not know each other, but between them they created the most moving work about young men and death that exists in music, perhaps in any art.

Simon Keenlyside, who has given Schubert's Winterreise a radical new look The work is Winterreise, the "winter's journey" described in 1828 by Franz Schubert's music and Wilhelm Müller's poetry. In a narrative over 24 songs, a young man wanders through wintry landscape, thinking of the girl he loves but who threw him over for someone richer.

For years, Trisha Brown refused to allow music anywhere near her brainy, minimalist works. Now she not only choreographs to her pick of the world's great scores but, in this new staging of Winterreise, tries to get dance and music deep under each other's skin. With baritone Simon Keenlyside performing alongside three dancers, the breath and muscle of his singing merge with those of the action.

In some sections, the dancers populate the world of Schubert's wanderer. As Keenlyside paces the stage, they assume the shapes of the trees, birds and sleeping villagers that the hero passes.

But much of the time, Keenlyside is not just travelling through this animate world but dancing in it, too.

Works of supererogation are, so ecclesiastical authority tells us, unnecessary for salvation. Doing more than you should, painting the lily, the extra jewel, sauce on sauce for a complex dish - this way lies vulgarity, let alone spiritual indigestion.

What then to make of Simon Keenlyside's decision to ask Trisha Brown to provide movement - I hesitate to call it dance - to accompany Schubert's Winterreise, a song-cycle so complete, so devastating in its emotional austerity, as to need nothing save the male voice and the accompanying pianist, and a public prepared to surrender to its snowy bleakness.

Shuffling around to Schubert Rupert Christiansen reviews Winterreise at the Barbican for The Daily Telegraph

Simon Keenlyside isn't the first singer to dramatise Winterreise. Thirty years ago, I remember a ludicrous BBC television version in which Peter Pears, clad in Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, stumbled across the studio as paper snow was dropped all over him; more recently, on Channel 4, the director David Alden provided Ian Bostridge with a context of fashionable postmodern anguish. In neither case did the imagery do anything to illuminate Schubert's song-cycle.

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